The present invention relates generally to the field of spectrometry, and more particularly to a mobile spectrometer device and analytic application.
Spectral decomposition analysis has been performed for more than 200 years in various fields of sciences with large and complex instruments. Modern iterations of spectral decomposition instruments require power and computer application control for moving optics, as sensitive control may aid in the decomposition of the original light beam into its spectral components. For certain industries, there is a need to develop small, portable, and cost effective spectrometers capable of attachment to mobile devices, for example, a cell phone or tablet, that can provide spectral images of different wavelengths at different special and temporal points. These new spectrometers may be a simple snap-on device that may be attached to a mobile device when it is necessary and may acquire images with high fidelity and resolution.
It is desired to obtain images from places where there is no other mean to obtain spectral information, e.g. a remote field/area, and validate observations that are acquired via other measurement instruments (e.g. remote measurements via a satellite). Note that remote measurements have a much coarser spatial resolution (around 1 km×1 km) when compared to the one achieved by a cell phone (1 cm×1 cm up to 1 m×1 m). In many situations, satellite images are acquired at weekly intervals, while cell phone images may be taken more frequently, resulting in more spectral information updates, for example, in crop health studies, the process may be done multiple times per day or at critical times related to certain plant development stages, depending of the needs of a particular crop.
The camera system included in many modern cell phone device have the capability to acquire spectral information in the visible and near infrared regime. The mobile device image acquisition capability is mainly limited by the optical response of the light detector (silicon in most of the cell phone devices). The wide bandwidth capability of the mobile devices allow images to be acquired in any narrow bandwidth centered on specific wavelength (by using, for example, a filter), and to extract reflection responses from the objects under study.